ABSTRACT
BARGAINING and negotiation, first studied from an economic standpoint (Nash, 1950), and later from a psychological standpoint (Siegel & Fouraker, 1960), recently has entered the domain of the communication scientist (Donohue, Diez, & Stahle, 1983; Putnam & Jones, 1982). As the study of bargaining has progressed, different aspects of the negotiation situation have been emphasized in each of the major theoretical approaches. Economic analyses typically have been grounded in game theory, a branch of mathematics devoted to the strategic dimension of conflict, and explicated in the classic works of von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944), Rappoport (1960), and Luce and Raiffa (1957). As a consequence of the game-theoretic emphasis, economists see bargaining as a phenomenon to be explained on the basis of the utility functions of the players and the payoff structure of the situation (Roth, 1979). Psychologists, although not ignoring utilities and payoffs, have tended to incorporate nonstrategic components into their theories. This tendency has led to the investigation of a number of behavioral, motivational, and personality variables in bargaining research (Rubin & Brown, 1975). The present study continues recent trends by taking a communication-oriented approach to bargaining—an approach that gives primacy to the interaction of the bargainers in explanations of outcome. The view presented herein parallels that of McGrath (1966), who sees the process of negotiation as “a fundamental form of human interaction” (p. 101). The explicit assumption of the present analysis is that a communication approach to bargaining will yield valuable insights into an extremely important form of human interaction.
